The Tin Man's Lullaby
by Harper008
Summary: She imagined this to be what a paperclip would feel like.


**The Tin Man's Lullaby.**

She imagined this to be what a paperclip would feel like.

She was tense and taught and bent, but not yet broken. She was twisted and turned and extended and she would have preferred to be broken, for him to just allow her to break beneath his touch, because then she could at least amass her broken pieces and continue on. The waiting to be shatter was what she could not handle.

His smile was painted in a lazy haze across his face, and he was running his finger over her hand.

She wished that she knew what he was thinking, that she could look inside him and figure this out for him and with him and at the same time for herself because to be stuck in a perpetual purgatory was causing her to take a hiatus from what she had once considered life.

She was scared because her heart had been dormant for so long, and she didn't even know if it was still there, let alone if it were capable of being used. She didn't know if she believed the theory that if you don't use something enough it disappears, and she didn't know if she sat before him as the tin man, a hollowed out chest with the will to love but the lack of ability.

She wanted to lie and make herself believe that she wasn't scared by this, that she didn't feel like she was standing on the edge of a canyon, screaming silent words that came back as resounding echoes, tearing through her ears and her mind and her heart. She was scared to go forward because she knew that once they left the calm waters of where they were, there was no going back. The channel would close and there would only be one way out – to sink.

She was afraid that this would be some circular progression, wherein a promise of progression is nothing more than a promise of regression, and she didn't know if one could be done without the other.

He was getting closer to her, moving down the couch, shifting his weight so that she felt the couch cushions tilt towards him, and she was scared because she couldn't lose him, but she couldn't stay in perpetual stagnation and she needed to proceed to something, but she knew better than to hope for such a thing.

If this was everything falling down around her, she was afraid to build it again.

"Do you think that if you don't use something enough, you lose it?" She was afraid that he would find nothing where he thought there was the potential for everything, and she was afraid that this would ruin them.

A pile of ruins, a city of ruins.

She loved him, but she was afraid to forgo the last piece of her to him, but she was afraid to keep it to herself as well.

"What?" Elliot looked to Olivia slowly because he was scared of what she was insinuating, scared of what she did or did not mean with her words and he wanted to be closer to her still, he wanted to move closer to her and be with her and be her.

He wanted to become her.

He would be a fool for trying and a wise man for failing, and in that order only, because fools try to attain the unattainable and wise men learn from such consequences.

He felt that his life had become a war, a great battle for something that he was trying to figure out, and he realized that he could not let the casualty of himself be for nothing – that if his family disintegrated around him because of the presumptions made for Olivia, then he should let their words and his reality finally break the ivory tower he'd built around his heart.

Life with Olivia, life without Olivia, had separated him from every belief he had ever believed, every prayer he had ever prayed, everything that he had ever known.

He was going to close his eyes and he was going to leap because he felt his heart for the first time in years, full and powerful in his chest, and he wondered if Olivia could she the life and energy that she gave it through him.

They told him he hadn't been living in years, when people saw him and his friends assessed his existence. They said he had been doing what he thought he should instead of what he felt he should and he was scared to do this and put himself back together, because he knew that he would never be whole again, either way.

With or without Olivia, you would always be able to see the seams.

"I'm sorry I haven't been talking to you lately," he looked away because if he didn't he would tell her the truth, and he wasn't ready to do that just yet.

He interpreted her question to mean that if they didn't use each other enough, if they didn't walk across the bridges between them, then they would crack and crumble and fall apart.

"We've been busy," she cleared her throat through the words.

The air was thick and both felt like they were being smothered by it – smothered by that which gave them life.

Olivia couldn't think about this in terms of what they had, she had to make herself think in terms of what could be. She couldn't think of the years between them, of the time that they had devoted to each other.

Time had been her only constant companion throughout the past six years. It came steadily and was unrelenting and reliable. It tied her to Elliot, if nothing else. The band of time between them bound them together because it gave them a story and a memory and an opportunity.

"Liv," he said her name slowly and he moved from the couch to the floor in front of her.

Suicide of self.

He was about to let go of every rational moment that he had ever had because he had to let something be stronger than that.

Elliot had to sit in front of her because he had to see her eyes, he had to see if and when she blockaded him, when she built up her walls and locked the door and let him fall away from her.

He needed her eyes to give light to what her words would leave in silent shadows.

She was afraid that if she didn't love him now she would lose him because his eyes were full, but empty and his hands were tough but gentle and she felt him going back and forth between two alternatives and she knew that she was the only one to move him to one place or the other.

"Elliot," she made his name hard as it came from her lips, and she reached for him, placing a hand on his cheek, and he turned his head and kissed the heel of her hand for a long moment.

This was an illusion, them sitting here like this was right and normal and okay and this was all just an illusion of self and time and place and Olivia could feel her heart beating and she didn't want it to leave her. She didn't want it to fall away from her and him and this, and she slid from the couch to be closer to him, sitting on the floor, her back propped up against the couch, between his legs. "It's a dead end," Elliot started, "you go right, or left, but you can't keep going in the direction that you were. You know it, I know it. So where do we go, Olivia?"

She felt his words, wrapped around her and through her and she swallowed hard when he intertwined their fingers together and brought their coupled hands up so that they were resting between their faces.

Olivia was settled, because this was the beautiful release that she needed. At the end of the day, this is what she needed, to be wrapped in Elliot, to be undifferentiable from every dream that she had ever made, from every prayer that she had every prayed to a god that she didn't believe.

"Break away," he said slowly, testing her. Daring her to move and breath and take herself away from this.

Olivia shook her head because her words were stuck below the tears in her throat.

"This is what we are." Their hands were still between them, and Elliot focused on Olivia's eyes over the mountain of knuckles. "Break Away." This was him telling her that he needed her without falling apart before her and having a conversation that he could not handle and her having to tell him everything directly, when their whole relationship was tainted with ambiguity.

Love without love, need without need, hope without hope.

"I don't know which are mine," Olivia said after a cluster of minutes, and Elliot swallowed his emotion.

She could feel him and she could feel her and she didn't know what was hers to take and what was not. At that moment she would have had to been convinced that they were two separate people; because every sensation she had ever felt was telling her otherwise.

"They all are." The words were a promise, and he reached out to Olivia's cheek and caught her tear, feeling the warm fire from it as if it were a falling star.

"Elliot?" She looked away from him, and he did not answer, giving her room for her words, but she could not find the right words to tell him how scared she was amid everything between them that was filling every corner of the room.

"Good," he said simply before dropping their hands and crawling over to her, letting a gentle kiss play on her neck. "If you weren't scared of this, I think that that would be worse," he offered his words quietly, and Olivia turned to him sharply, seeing her eyes mirrored and reflected in the blue of his.

Suicide of self.

Olivia Benson had just sold herself for the price of love- for the price of Elliot's touch and eyes and soul and beating of his heart.

She moved closer to him, close enough so that she could feel his heart – feel what she had just taken from him, and Elliot placed his arms around her, pushing her to him until she could feel his skin and bones and he could feel hers.

This was Olivia's lullaby – the feeling of Elliot's heart, now her own, pressed to her and into her – she took comfort in it and from it and for the first time in her life she allowed herself to settle.

If you don't use something enough, you will lose it, but you will find it in someone else, Olivia noted before Elliot breathed his life and heart and soul into her.


End file.
